Sketching – a quickie is better than not doing it at all

In the August 11-19, 2007 weekly drawing thread on Wetcanvas, they finally came back to a portrait (I wish they would do portraits more often). I jumped at the opportunity and here’s what I came up with:

I rotated her head to straight-on for my own purposes. If you click the image, you can see a close-up detailing a lot of my reference lines in this portrait. Keep in mind that this is simply about an hour’s worth – about 30 minutes laying out the reference lines and doing preliminary work, then about 30 minutes blurring my eyes and sketching in the portrait.

I also did this portrait entirely with a 3H pencil. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used a pencil that hard but my 2 year old was drawing with it so I decided to give it a go to see how it came out. The darks were REALLY hard to get and nowhere near as dark as they should be. Now I better appreciate a range of pencils after this little experiment. Fun!

Not my best work, but that’s the point – keeping your skills up to speed requires some exercises. If you play an instrument, you probably warm up with scales just about every day. If you’re an IT geek, you probably read Anandtech.com, OSNews, HardOCP.com, et al, just about every day to stay current. Whatever your profession, you stay current with quickies to keep your “chops” up. And the same applies to drawing, especially portraits – practice the mundane every day and keep stretching your repertoire to keep it exciting and fresh.

Yes, just an hour for a quick sketch is better than an hour on the couch watching your TiVO’d episode of The 4400 (ooh, that reminds me, now that I’m done with my art for the day, I have an episode of The 4400 recorded!).